Nobody's Perfect, But You're Terrible

Ramesh Ponnuru makes a point about this Vito business that I ought to be sure to respond to. Specifically, he takes issue with my hope that we can all agree to deem adulterous public officeholders bad persons:

Ross Douthat seems to agree. I don’t—especially with this “bad person” business. I certainly believe that someone who cheats on his wife has done a bad thing. I would be reluctant to judge someone a “bad person” without knowing the context. (A long-ago affair? Serial womanizing? One time, with regrets?) For that matter, I’m not sure that moral judgment usually requires us to divide the world between “bad people” and “not-bad people”; sometimes, categorizing people that way may make it harder for us to see clearly.

I wasn’t trying to hide the football, but in no way do I endorse a moral framework in which people are neatly divided into baddies and non-baddies. That doesn’t mean we can’t single out baddies from time to time. Ramesh is flat-out correct to recognize that a good moral framework needs nuances, not least because moral and immoral acts are themselves nuanced, milder or more severe, fleeting or protracted, etc., etc. There are several different vectors and spectra at work every time we make a moral judgment. But we should be able to focus a moral judgment in on someone and something and call it bad without fearing that, behind our backs, having aimed our opprobrium in one direction has caused our approval to magically fan out in all other directions.

One of the worst features of moral relativism is that it encourages this kind of fear: if morals are relative, then quanta of approval and opprobrium are interchangeable; to withhold praise while praising elsewhere is as good as to condemn. I think this is not just bad morality but bad logic, and as much as I want to be clear that I’m in full agreement with Ramesh on the moral-nuance tip, I have to insist that we can identify and discuss ‘bad persons’ without constructing ourselves as morally bulletproof ‘not-bad persons’. The way that the Christian injunction against casting the first stone has been secularized into a standing moral handicap does our politics a great disservice. Nobody forces politicians into politics; you join the game, you play by the rules. As I remarked earlier, I’m pretty concerned that many of us now believe that politics is such a rotten game that we should expect plenty of cheaters and go particularly easy on them if they’re MVPs. If we can’t punish bad actors despite being, ourselves, occasionally bad in some ways, we’re in for a losing record this season — and many to come.

(Dunce cap photo courtesy of Flickr user thane. No endorsement of violating museum rules implied. That’s moral nuance, people.)